At eleven at night, in a Jiangcheng convenience store, I was just an advertising copywriter who couldn’t even scrape together enough for subway fare. Then a sudden flash of unfamiliar memories let me fix a freezer in three minutes, something even the repair technician couldn’t manage.
At the time, I thought it was just a hallucination caused by exhaustion from working overtime. But then a shadow appeared at the end of the alley, a patient at the hospital claimed to have “seen another version of himself,” and an anonymous text arrived with a photo of me fixing the freezer. That was when I realized those memories didn’t belong to me.
They came from twelve parallel worlds. They held hacking skills, traditional Chinese acupuncture, and survival techniques for the apocalypse, as well as a space-time rift capable of bringing Jiangcheng to its knees. They could help me cure my mother’s chronic leg pain, and help me evade a stranger’s deadly pursuit.
The “Shadow Weavers” hunting me want more than these memories. They want my “anchor constitution,” which lets me connect to twelve worlds. The owner of the “Memory Pawnshop” in the old district’s antique market keeps warning me, “The more memories you have, the thinner reality becomes.” Even the person I most want to protect has begun asking me, “Who are you, really?”
It turns out that being ordinary was never a disguise that could protect me. As fragments of parallel worlds crash into reality and the lives of twelve versions of me battle inside my head, I must either use these memories to protect those around me or watch the merging of space and time devour everything.
But no one told me that when all twelve sets of memories finally come together, I’ll have to choose: return to being an ordinary advertising copywriter in Jiangcheng, or become a guardian spanning parallel worlds?
